Info 202 Fall 2011

The WTC memorial commemorates the lives
lost on February 12, 1993 and September 11, 2001, including those in
the Pentagon and aboard United Airlines Flight 93. “Reflecting
Absence” consists of 76 bronze panels surrounding two pools of
cascading water, the North Pool and South Pool. All the names are
engraved on the panels, but not alphabetically or chronologically;
the memorial's planners did not want any names to be inadvertently
favored over any others. They chose to represent the relationships as
well as the names of the people lost; a web pattern approach to
designing the memorial.

Information was collected from the
families of the victims regarding their relationships, including
personal, business and/or incidental connections to the people who
died with them. A “data artist” created an algorithm, using
open-source Processing language, that organized these “meaningful
adjacencies” into clusters, and then sub clusters, then by place of
death (one of the Towers, the Pentagon, or Flight 93). The final
result managed to incorporate 99% of the over 1200 adjacency requests
that were submitted. Aesthetic logistics such as name length, spacing
and font issues were taken into account as well. However, the data
designer insists the algorithm was only a tool to provide a
framework; that ultimately, humans chose the shape and design.

“Names on WTC memorial arranged by
algorithm” by Tim Hornyak, published on Crave:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20104551-1/names-on-wtc-memorial-arranged-by-algorithm/?tag=cnetRiver